Ubisoft+Bungie Scrambling to Evacuate Players Games from Capsizing Google Stadia
forbes.com
forbes.com
I’m used to Google pulling the rug under their users. They are a B2C company for most of the product they stop. It only somewhat damages their image. Probably not much revenue lost there.
But mismanaging their large business partners seems new. That’s the kind of reputation which can really negatively affect their other B2B products. For it to leak like that in the press, they must really have botched it. Makes you wonder what’s happening at Google.
Sundar is a sus CEO. Ballmer of the decade, knows how “Google works”, but was riding high on money printer going brr. He does not seem to have a clear vision forward with the cheap cash tap turned off.
I can't tell anymore what they're trying to do, earlier Google was exciting with new products and features for us techies. GMail launch was awe-inducing at the time, now we know such excitement came with the cost of a steady march of dead products and leaving a dissatisfied mass of users/consumers in its wake. The last big move playing out I remember from Google was YouTube's purchase.
I don't know what Google wants to do or be, it's has slowly became a big ball of mud around the cash cow from DoubleClick's acquisition...
[1] https://business.panasonic.nl/mobile-solutions/rugged-laptop...
I'll probably check out GeForce NOW at some point, but I currently don't have a way to use my only controller (Stadia) with my TV.
Some find find the initial 300-400 EUR investment a bit steep but after you go through that they have sales all the time and you can easily amass a collection of 50+ games for a maximum of 200 EUR. I did that over the course of 2 years -- less than 10 EUR a month. Now I can't decide which game to play because I have so many, lol.
I'm a fan of cloud gaming and have used both Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming. It appeals to me, as I don't have to invest in a gaming rig and can play on almost everything.
Or just performance in general, or a game library not made entirely by Nintendo, or hardware that doesn't have problems after a few months of usage, or, or, or...
The Switch is good for people that specifically want the Nintendo Switch games, for anyone else it's the absolute last choice any day of the week.
The Switch is good for anyone that wants a portable console that can also easily be played on a TV with friends and family. Sure if you're a PC Master Race Snob who absolutely can't stand if a game is remotely under 1080p 60FPS maybe it's not the console for you but IME at least everything is playable except for a handful of awful ports.
For $100 more you'll get a Steam deck, which will be superior in literally every aspect.
> Sure if you're a PC Master Race Snob who absolutely can't stand if a game is remotely under 1080p 60FPS
The Nintendo Switch struggles to run Nintendo games at 25 FPS at 720p. And this is with graphics would be bested by a phone. There's nothing about being a snob here.
Hell you can pick up an XBox 360 for $20 on eBay and it will run better than a Nintendo Switch. Also the controller won't break after 30 hours of usage, unlike the Switch.
None of my Switch controllers have broken either and they've seen more than 30 hours use.
I have both a Switch and Steam Deck. The Steam Deck is good and more powerful but it's also considerably bigger, louder, heavier with worse battery life and I've run into far more issues in the 2 months with it on verified games alone than all my time with the Switch. Using it docked is clunky, ditto doing local play. It's still a PC at heart which is fine but the Switch has an ease of use factor the Steam Deck simply does not have.
Worth picking them up second hand now too, Facebook marketplace seems to have some pretty good deals going at times.
Just buy an Xbox controller. I bought mine almost 10 years ago and still use it regularly when playing on a computer.
I’ve never bought an Xbox but having an Xbox controller around is really convenient.
These services are basically unusable to everyone I know, and we have pretty decent connections. The input lag is just horrific.
OTOH, what really kills the experience IME is the jitter. Even if you have decent latency with Wifi, a brief spike in latency can ruin the race that you've been competing in for the last 5 minutes, for example. Wired internet obviates this, and powerline adapters are cheap and fix this for good.
1. Have fiber.
2. Live in a major city that has a direct line to their datacenter.
You can literally get 1-2ms latency from your home to AWS/GCP/Azure with such a setup, as it's all fiber from your home->ISP->IX->datacenter and there's no additional inter-city routing. This is compared to DSL/Cable which pretty much has a ~10ms delay to the exchange in perfect conditons, and the even larger delays involved in routing a packet over multiple hops across the country.
For the second condition I think that those cloud gaming services publish their available server locations or provide some sort of speed/ping test service to test your connection. Being so dependent on latency it would make sense for them to have this available to their potential customers. You can also check for IX peering info and the like but there's no guarantee that having a presence there means your game server is located there (e.g. Google may have a datacenter in the city and peer with your ISP but the Stadia servers may be somewhere else).
[1] https://epub.uni-regensburg.de/40182/1/On_the_Latency_of_USB...
https://stadiafever.com/why-does-the-stadia-controller-use-w...
Note: if you want to give your Stadia controller a second life after the service shuts down, you can do that using USB. Reportedly rumble works on Steam and Xbox. Bluetooth does not work, even though there seems to be a lot of demand for that.
In my case I'm pretty sure it was wireless congestion despite only having a low tier cable service. I live in a town home right beside some condos and the throughput sinks like a stone as soon as I move away from my router. If I stood right beside the router it actually worked fine despite the relatively slow nominal performance of my internet connection.
I imagine this wouldn't have been an intractable problem. I could have spent the time and money to optimize the networking in my house. But the fact is, everything else I want to do works well enough for my purposes - except Stadia. I can't imagine a non technical user would bother to diagnose this class of issue before just giving up and buying a console.
Eventually my Steam Deck pre-order shipped and I never looked back.
Good selection supported of games tied to your Steam/Epic/Origin purchases. They suport Ubisoft+ and EA Play (for at least some of the games). Played through a bunch of Ubisoft titles I'd missed this way.
I use a Playstation 4 controller with my Macbook Pro and it all works nicely. Not sure how that would work with TV.
Also some GOG purchases (like Witcher 3 or CP2077).
Google is going to need to dig deep into their wallets to build an ecosystem in any new market in the future.
Then again, Stadia is too early and costing them too much money. More people need fiber internet before it’s practical. Good thing Google killed their fiber internet rollout years ago…
This Ubisoft initiative to transfer licenses to PC is actually worthless to me since my PC doesn't have a GPU capable of playing games anyway and I have no intention to buy one.
Google is panically trying to find another unicorn, as it knows its current cash cow, ads, is holding almost all its eggs and could be facing its demise as online regulation only continues to strengthen.
Not to mention google’s perverse promotional incentives that ignore supporting products long term, focusing on launching new things instead.
Google, as it is right now, is a dying company. They need basically a complete overhaul, starting with firing the entire C-level, especially the true CEO, Ruth Porat.
Today An RX580 (released in 2017) can be had for $100-$200 and is enough to comfortably run any modern game at quite nice settings. It's been a while since I looked as well, it's entirely possible the Ethereum swap is pushing card prices down even lower.
You only need the silly priced cards if you want to do something like play games on maxed out settings in 4k at a locked 120fps.
(This is a major problem with California’s energy planning. On the one hand, CA (IMO fairly sensibly) wants users to switch from gas to electricity. On the other hand, CA’s electricity prices are so egregiously inflated that people have an economic incentive to switch from electricity to gas.)
In a more perfect world, that would be the case!
This is a good thing
2h average a day playing games
40c/kWh for power
30 * 0.4 * 2 * 0.5 = 12 EUR/month
Stadia Pro was 10 EUR. So you're not wrong, though it's easily within the margin of error for this ballpark estimate (e.g. I wish I still had 14 hours a week for gaming; the power draw could be off by a factor of two in either direction, ...). And in winter, using power for computing is just a roundabout way of heating your living area, so in a way, it's free. I wonder if increased electricity costs were a factor in shutting down Stadia.
...which we also no longer have, exactly because they consume too much electricity compared to LEDs.
This will be a common attitude in the future as far as Google's consumer products go. People will buy them expecting them to shut down in a few years, but now they'll also expect a refund.
If you're a Googler who dreams of heading up a project to make something consumer-facing it'll be a lot harder to get buy-in from the board now that it'll cost so much more to shut it down (in dollars if a refund is given or in good will if it isn't) anything that's not a massive success.
Not the developers who poured millions into porting games.
Worked fine for me on GFN, Paperspace and Shadow.
At some point in time we can't fix the entire universe because people don't the know the fuck what they are talking about.
Here's what people want. They want to plug their gig service into their 11 year old cable modem that supports 250Mbps and plug in their 12 year old "g" router which if their service is "good" or "strong" enough it will somehow make radio waves burst through walls like the kool aid man screaming "oh ya" as it drives gigabit speed to all devices on multiple floors of the house simultaneously somehow defying both common sense and the laws of physics.
Meanwhile people will drop $3000 a year on cable TV but not the cost of installing decent hardware. It is perfectly normal for at least some devices sometimes MANY devices with a connection in the neighborhood of 10Mbps with random interruptions.
Good wifi would mean a router per floor with a wired backhaul with additional wireless extenders as needed if you expect to have actual fast internet away from the main router.
This is absolute nonsense. Average end-to-end input-to-rendered-frame latency is half that at 60fps and more like a third of that in 120hz mode in Gears 5 on the Series X https://www.neogaf.com/threads/xbox-series-x-input-latency-r...
Lots of similar results abound. Here’s Multiverse on the PS5 averaging 31ms end-to-end latency at 60fps: https://twitter.com/noodalls/status/1552942081014132738
“100ms of input lag alone” (before the engine even has the input? c’mon mate) is a preposterous idea.
With an Intel AX201 WiFi chip connecting to a UniFi6 Lite my average latency is 1ms to the router.
Even a cheap and somewhat compromised WiFi chipset/antenna can do way better than 30-50ms latency. Here's an original Pi Zero W connecting through the same AP hitting the local router:
64 packets transmitted, 64 received, 0% packet loss, time 156ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.293/6.699/63.116/7.364 ms
This is while I've got streaming music playing on my phone on WiFi connected to Bluetooth headphones, streaming video on the WiFi TV, and other wireless network traffic happening.
A 63ms delay on some packets can totally ruin the user experience even if the average is relatively low... and this is the best a near-optimal (in the real world) setup can do.
If you left your test running longer than 64 packets, I'm sure you would see at least a 100ms max. GP wasn't far-off with their assertion that running on WiFi can easily add 30-50ms of latency. Their wording was a bit loose though.
If we only looked at max values then Amazon isn't 2 day shipping it's like 1 month because some delivery sometime took that long, even though like 95% of deliveries are within two days (just an example, don't know what their actual rates are)
And on top of that, that's with an extremely cheap chip with a compromised antenna inside a network closet with a TCXO literally right on top of the antenna running on 2.4FHz. My 5GHz example with a nice AX chip and decent laptop lid edge antenna never experienced any pings higher than 1ms.
The test uses 64 packages which is a tiny sample size for streaming use. If we blindly scale that up you would hit the max several dozen times per minute.
> If we only looked at max values then Amazon isn't 2 day shipping it's like 1
A better example: Imagine your tongue just stops moving once every minute and then tries to catch up with what you where doing, imagine this will happen for the next two months. It is just a minor annoyance, right?
A person I know was diagnosed with tinnitus. And it (the diagnosis) made him happy. For over a year he was frustrated, nervous, but he didn't know why. Turns out he was hearing noise all that time, but just didn't realize it. Sounds (pun not intended) ridiculous, but that's how the mind works.
ping -i 0.02 -s 1400 router.home.lan
. . . lots of pings . . .
6203 packets transmitted, 6203 received, 0% packet loss, time 128938ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.023/3.397/43.075/1.785 ms, pipe 2
This kind of latency is achievable on a $10 board with only 2.4GHz Wireless N. Suggesting WiFi adds 50ms latency on average is extreme hyperbole.
That's what you're arguing when looking at just the max value.
Makes sense.
So if a video frame consists of 64 packets, the whole frame will be delayed by 63.1ms.
Yes there are ways around this (FEC), but getting 1ms 99%ile latency over wifi IRL is nontrivial.
Btw fat-client PCs have much smaller latency spikes, but even those spikes are noticable and make games feel jittery. That's why we compare GPUs based on "1% lows" instead of average FPS. Also see frame pacing.
Streaming video is extremely nontrivial to start with. Use FEC when necessary.
Also I just threw a thousand 1400B packets over my wifi and 99% was something like 5ms, max 10ms. 5ms is close enough for me, and I could probably hit 2ms with light effort.
Btw you almost certainly tested on an unloaded connection so you're not seeing any HOL blocking like a real video stream would. Try playing a 20mbps YouTube video in the background while you ping. Oh and turn on a microwave oven when you're 3 walls (a room and a hallway) away from the AP for extra hilarity on the order of 80ms
Ping statistics for router.home.lan:
Packets: Sent = 793, Received = 793, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 1ms, Maximum = 5ms, Average = 1msAnd you don't need to use webrtc, or you can add your own FEC on top for your client software.
And yes a 4k YouTube video makes it worse but "don't do that" is a valid response and realtime video won't be so bursty. I can get a very nice ping while more stable bandwidth hogs are running. Microwave is also "don't do that".
Over here in the urbanized world it's a whole different world of pain.
I live walking distance to a train to take me to an airport non stop around the world.
Try again.
Uhm... What?
That's a pretty catastrophically high estimate though, you're right.
30-50ms per hop is absurd.
Fortunately, USB-C to Ethernet adapters start at $16.
I maintain contact with several non-tech people. When they realized that e.g. Valorant will work better with a cable they very quickly deciphered the USB-to-Ethernet adapters market and asked a father or a friend to run their cable properly. Took each of them 2-3 days and they're much happier casual gamers now.
Where there is a need, a way is found. When the need arises, people learn. Seen it happen several times.
You don't get a big library of games for free to stream, and you don't get to use existing licenses of games you already own, now you have to double dip the full price of a game to play it on Stadia.
Unfortunately, this outcome was easily predicable to anyone who follows google.
This is not a very good fit for games, however: everyone sells and watches the same movie and almost nobody watches the same ones for anywhere near as long as gamers play them.
I don’t think movie purchases at any one retailer drives the kind of numbers Google was hoping to get out of Stadia.
Eg https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-martian/id1039586890
Which is the same price as some games
Eg https://stadia.google.com/game/human-fall-flat-stadia-editio...
That's the game I brought when I dipped my toe in to try it out (although I remember it being cheaper than that).
> I don’t think movie purchases at any one retailer drives the kind of numbers Google was hoping to get out of Stadia.
I have no idea, but it's notable that movies don't need porting to a platform, but each game will need at least a little work.
According to this, 2021 electronic sales of movies totaled $737M. https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
I’ve heard people say there is lag but apparently the platforms have optimized them heavily in recent years and I’ve personally never experienced any problems after hundreds of hours on both Xbox cloud and Paperspace, with maxed out graphics.
100-250mbps connection is probably more than enough. And those connections are becoming the standard in the western world.
Back in the day, FiOS offering gigabit at your address was a handy shorthand for being on a more modern ONT, not using DSL to deliver it to your apartment over crappy copper, etc.
Never tried Stadia; _even though_ I got their controller & chrome cast 4k for free in some promo offer! It was just too much work to end up paying full price for games I already owned! Such a bad bad product. The most greatest of technology/engineering! And yet, such a waste!
Google really has fallen in my eyes. As a software engineer, I would be so scared to go there to work on something new.
As I understand it, the Stadia controller can be used like a wired USB game controller on a PC.
It’s a nice enough controller tbh. It’s just so inconvenient compared to my wireless dualsense controller. Or any other controller: Xbox, dualshock4, steam, backbone controller connected to an iPhone etc.
The stadia controller is really nice in the sense that it has Google assistant built in yadda yadda. Imagine if they made that configurable to control Cortana on windows. Or some form or voice control on windows. It would make using my living room PC that much easier.
It was early when OnLive started the whole thing. Now? It's already a market. One that Google doesn't understand.
Google killed fiber rollout because they were forced out by other ISPs...
Issue with Stadia was Linux. Linux choked the entire platform. You had to get developers to port their game. If they used Windows they would have a solid platform with thousands of games. Instead they are at the mercy of "bribing" devs to port their game to Stadia.
This is really simple: people no longer trust Google.
The issue is in a low latency environment, translating directx to vulkan may have overhead.
I seriously doubt that if you count every single developer that Valve hired to work on it as well as sponsored 3rd-party developers there likely gonna be 25-30 people or less.
I pretty sure that more people worked on Stadia within Google than all people working in Valve on all of their projects.
So this has already happened, and will only get worse for Google - unless they start putting some soul into these projects
I wonder if the sudden cut is part of Google preparing for a recession.
A recession is what we say in 2008.
But the definition of a recession has always been two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, and that has in fact happened.
It's funny to me because if we're resorting to semantics and nitpicking to prove whether or not there is a massive and broadly defined societal issue going on, then it probably isn't really happening... at least not enough to write home about.
It may not be a severe recession. It may not affect our quality of life all that much. Media may be blowing it out of proportion. It's not my goal to argue either way (I'm honestly not qualified to do so and it seems most experts don't know yet).
But saying "it isn't really happening" is just false. We don't get to just redefine words based on our feelings.
Stadia business model was flawed from the start, people want to own the games they buy, they might buy a new expensive computer in the future and don’t want to pay for the game twice. With Geforce Now you play the games that are already in your steam library.
Yes, everything that I don't personally like shouldn't exist because there's no way it could work for someone if it doesn't work for me, right?
I am not a fan of cloud gaming, but Stadia as a service wasn't bad. As for owning games, you don't own your Steam games either, unfortunately.
As glad as I am for Valve supporting Linux, the real practical difference between Steam and Stadia is that Valve has proven it will keep it around. But in terms of ownership there's hardly a difference.
But I can keep my Steam games’ executables and run them without Steam, either as-is (many games are DRM-free) or with a fake Steam API DLL.
Come this January, all Stadia games will be lost.
* It was my primary console for about 18 months until I finally got a new xbox. worked almost flawlessly until the last few months, when Google's divestment in the platform began to show up in its performance.
* It eliminated cheaters, which were a huge problem in the PC version of the game I play the most (Destiny 2).
I'm bummed they're shutting down Stadia though its not world-ending for me. But I'm really not sure GFN or similar is going to work well for me on that second point, and I don't even own a PC to play those games natively. I do have an xbox now to play on, but I still do log into Stadia when i'm traveling or in another room and don't feel like coaxing my wife off the tv in the living room.
How about being able to run the game on hardware that I own? On stadia I have to rent hardware from a single vendor, while on steam I can run it on my own hardware or rent hardware from cloud vendors to run my game.
There are many of us who do not want to see that future ever, where the only way to play game is to stream it.
Even Android, only succeeded because OEMs also like free beer instead of paying licenses and the day Android stops being, they can anyway carry on with the last AOSP code drop.
I would have thought that because destiny 2 is an online game, the save files would be kept on bungie's servers. Perhaps the issue with the game is more that players need to link their identity to their account on a second platform.
He he. :-)
Reminds me of the folks who ran daily backups, but never tried to restore until they had an actual disaster (and discovered that their backups were corrupt).
Hopefully, these Stadia-exported game saves can be used by other platforms like Steam.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-stadia-shi...
Hard to tell if this is incredible mismanagement or sheer arrogance.
Google can roll in its arrogance as long as there is no credible search engine competitor or it is chopped to pieces with competion laws.
Yes.
All of us techies around me thought this was yet another dillettanting around by Google that they were going to dismiss any day now.
And we were not wrong.
As a product I agree Stadia was dead on arrival, there was no chance people were going to buy games again on a brand new platform at full price with the potential for a poor experience every time your wifi flaked a bit.
The tech behind it though I find fascinating. I would love to have the ability to stream my games to a chromecast that I can attach to my TV downstairs, or take with me travelling. Most of the games I play aren't fast paced so the odd latency blip for the convenience wouldn't bother me personally.
I think the way google should have played it is gotten into bed with Valve. I feel like there is a market fit for steam link without the local streaming faff. Use google's infrastructure to stream your back catalogue of steam games for $XX/month, maybe throw in the odd free game like the game pass and I can see it gaining some traction. Certainly it would have more chance of success than going in to a mature market solo.
I don’t see the problem with owning a physical machine for your back catalogue. There’s no real problems there that aren’t created by greedy companies.
Couldn't agree more, but personally I'm old and my days of playing quake or CS1.6 are over so I don't care about latency. I totally understand streaming games is never going to cover all gamers though.
> I don’t see the problem with owning a physical machine for your back catalogue. There’s no real problems there that aren’t created by greedy companies.
My physical machine isn't in the same room as my TV and is far from portable.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't wouldn't be a lifechanging experience for me and I don't see this as a huge gap in the market. However if the tech behind Stadia was going to fit anywhere, leveraging an existing ecosystem felt like the best way.
Fiber DisplayPort cables are pretty cheap these days and can go across the house with 99%ile latency in the microsecond range (0.7ft/ns speed of light in fiber)
So- there's at least one real human out there! I suspect there are dozens of us!
Maybe its gotten better since then, the last time I gave it a try was back in the spring. But I was far from impressed.
People playing games is a wide demographic, with very different priorities and limits.